This was on a Tuesday. That evening, and through the night, the English assembled their forces, and Yorkshire and Lancashire labourers marched on Penrith in bodies of 300 at a time. They came from as far away as Shap, ten miles off, and even from Kendal, which is twenty. Before nine o’clock on Wednesday morning, to the great alarm of the inhabitants of Penrith, more than 2,000 Englishmen had assembled in the town to thrash the Irish. The Irish had fled, or most of them. Only a few remained, and they hid. The invaders ransacked the town, routing them out. Twelve or fifteen were found in a lodging house and then, said the Carlisle Patriot, a scene of cruelty ensued such as had never been witnessed in Penrith since the Border Incursions. The house was broken into, the lurking Irishmen pulled out from their hiding places, and beaten with bludgeons so that their lives were despaired of. A bystander said, ‘It was a regular butchery; and could be compared with nothing else than turning rats into a box, and as many laying on with sticks as could get near them.’ One of the Englishmen was John Hobday, and he laid into Denis Salmon, an Irishman, with a pick shaft. Salmon called out for mercy, but Hobday just urged the others to join in the beating. ‘Pitch into the bugger,’ he said, ‘he has life enough in him yet.’ When Salmon was lying on the ground, unmoving, a farmer tried to intervene and begged Hobday not to kill the man. Hobday took no notice. Salmon, he said, was shamming, and it was well known an Irishman would sulk for an hour before he was killed.
It took the Westmorland Yeomanry to restore order. Hobday and some others were arrested, but this was not the end of the affair. In the next two weeks, while Hobday and his fellow prisoners were awaiting trial at Cumberland Assizes at Carlisle, the Irish twice tried to avenge themselves on the English. They were dispersed, the first time by cavalry, the second time by a force of yeomanry. The Irish only hesitated when they first saw the yeomanry, but ran off when the soldiers were ordered to load their carbines.
The riots spread as far south as Kendal, also on the Lancaster and Carlisle line. There a body of about fifty Irishmen appealed to the Mayor of Kendal, Cornelius Nicholson, for protection. They told the usual story – they had been driven from their work by the Scots and their huts had been pillaged or set fire to. The mayor and magistrates assembled and did what they could to help, and had a handbill printed saying that strict measures would be taken to protect the peaceable in their lawful calling and to bring offenders to justice. The Irish were sent back to work again, under cover of the mayor and magistrates, who stood by on horseback, attended by the police force of the town.
A few days later, over the border into Scotland, great masses of rioting navvies were on the march again, this time on the Edinburgh to Hawick line being built by the North British Railway. Between nine and ten o’clock one morning more than 1,000 Scots patriots, led by a piper and a bugler, were marching northwards in the direction of Edinburgh to beat up 200 Irishmen. The discontent had been seething for a long time. The navvies were living two to a bed in timber huts which resembled nothing so much as prison hulks. The food was terrible and the men complained bitterly that they were swindled at the tommy shops – as was only natural because the contractors were also the truckmen. The gangers were worthless, dissipated bullies, chosen indeed because they were bullies and thus could force their men to work. As for the contractors, they were just as much afraid of their men as the local population were, and had no control over the navvies. The work had been more hazardous than usual, many had been killed, and tunnelling had been pushed on day and night with a haste which the sheriff for the county of Edinburgh, Graham Speirs, considered inconsistent with safety. Sheriff Speirs was most unhappy: he not only deplored the way the navvy rabble lived, but he feared ‘the effect that such an exhibition of social life may have on the population of Scotland’. He argued vigorously that railway companies who brought large bodies of workmen on to their lines should be obliged in some way to bring with them the means of preserving order, morality, and religion among the people. The contractors, however, were not greatly concerned with such things and Sheriff Speirs had to preserve what order he could with a force of four or five policemen on the whole line.
On top of all this, the navvies were the usual mixed lot – Scots, English, and Irish. They were segregated, of course (they had to be or no work would ever have been done), the Irish being employed on that part of the line nearer Edinburgh, and the Scots and English to the south of them. The greatest danger was always at a pay day. Trouble was bound to come, and it came on a pay day on the last Saturday of February.
At Gorebridge, about ten miles south of Edinburgh, the gangs of Irish navvies had been paid in a pub. Many of them were angry because they had received less than they thought was due to them: they were illiterate and had not kept any count of the past month’s tickets which all mounted up and consumed a great part of their wages. But they had enough to get drunk on. In the course of the long drinking evening a packman arrived at the village and went to the pub. The Irish were there, by now thoroughly happy, but still with some money left. Would they like, asked the packman, to see some watches, good watches? All right, said the navvies, and two watches were handed round for inspection. That was the last the packman saw of them. When he asked for the watches back they laughed at him. What watches? There was no point in arguing with a gang of drunken Irishmen, so the packman went to the village police station and complained. Two of the carousing navvies were dragged out of the pub, arrested, and locked in one of the cells at the station.
For a while the Irish muttered to each other. Look what those damned Scots policemen had done. The news spread, the navvies gathered, the muttering grew into a universal grievance against the generality of damned Scots, and someone began a collection, which his colleagues rapidly took up, of all the pickaxes, bludgeons, and hedge-bills to be found. By half past one in the morning there were nearly 200 Irishmen, suitably armed, and they moved off to make their representations to the police.
The two policemen who happened to be in charge at the time, Sergeant Brown and Constable Christie, tried at first to reason with the men and to prevent them from entering, but they soon saw that the Irishmen were determined and that it was impossible to stand against such a mob. For fear of their lives they gave way, and even then Sergeant Brown had his left arm disabled by a blow with the back of an axe. The rabble crowded into the station and found the cells. One of the mob then ordered the sergeant to unlock the prisoners and, when he refused, presented a pistol at his head and threatened to kill him there and then unless he did what he was told. The sergeant still refused, so the men left him alone and pulled down the cell door themselves, freed the two prisoners, and marched off with them towards Fushie Bridge, about half a mile off.
They had gone only a short distance when they met two policemen on their ordinary round, the district constable, Richard Pace, and John Veitch of the railway police. Pace and Veitch heard the rabble and tried to save themselves by hiding in a hedge, but it was too late. They were seen, pounced on, and dragged out. Veitch escaped in the scramble, but Pace was knocked senseless by a severe blow on the head from a pick handle. The Irishmen laughed at him, put the boot in as he lay on the ground, and then left him. He was all but dead. Two lads who had heard the shouts of the mob from a distance, crept up when the navvies had gone, and found the constable lying on the road only a hundred yards or so from his own house. The alarm was given, Pace was carried home, and a doctor got out of bed. But Pace was so badly hurt that he never spoke again, and at six o’clock on Sunday evening he died. He was a married man, but had no children. Veitch, the policeman who got away, was hurt about the head, but was well enough to go back on duty on Monday. By mid morning on Sunday the news had reached Edinburgh, where Alfred List, superintendent of the county police, hastily consulted with the sheriff and agreed to send a contingent of the county force, together with twenty-four of the city police, to Gorebridge. This force reached the village at midday but by then the rioters had dispersed and all was quiet.
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p; But not for long. News of the outrages had also reached the navvies working on a stretch of the same line to the south, and these men were Scots, mostly Highlanders, and English. They hated the Irish, and resolved to extirpate the Paddies, burn their huts and be rid of them at last. All this was to be done, so it was afterwards explained, to avenge the dead policeman, who was a Scot. The rest of Sunday was given up to planning and drinking and threatening, and then, early on the Monday morning, the Scots and English moved, more than 1,000 of them by now, towards the Irish huts. The local policeman saw this gathering and sent a rider off to Edinburgh. Another detachment of the city police was sent out from Edinburgh in a coach and four, and the cavalry at Piershill barracks were alerted. But by this time the navvies were well on their way, gathering numbers as they went. At Newbattle paper mills, which they reached between nine and ten o’clock, they were joined by 150 of the Marquis of Lothian’s colliers, also keen to rout the Irish. There were now nearly 1,500 on the march, and they drew themselves up in proper array, with colours flying, with a piper and bugler at their head, and armed with bludgeons and shafts which they had wrenched from the hammers and other tools belonging to the railway, not one of which remained intact.
At Chrichton Muir, to the north, the Irish waited until they saw how many were coming against them, and then they fled, some leaving their families behind. So when the Scots reached the first huts they were unopposed. They smashed and burned, and the huts of wood and turf were soon so many heaps of smouldering ruins. On again they went, and burned the huts near Borthwick Castle. One solitary row, that nearest Edinburgh, was all that now remained, and this was soon levelled with the rest. ‘It was truly pitiable,’ said the reporter of the Scottish Herald,
to see several of the wives of the Irish labouters sitting, at short distance from the blazing huts, in the midst of a few articles of furniture, which they were able to save from the flames, wrapped up in the cloaks peculiar to their country, and watching with melancholy countenances the gradual demolition of their humble dwellings.
Having set fire to all the huts of the Irish, the rabble began to disperse, though on their way back to their own camps they were tempted to break into a house at Fushie Bridge where one of the Irish contractors had taken refuge. But there were fewer of them now, they felt they had already done a good day’s work, and they allowed themselves to be persuaded to leave the contractor in one piece. By four o’clock in the afternoon, after it was all over, Sheriff Speirs and his men arrived in time to inspect the ruins. Later still sixty dragoons rode in from Edinburgh. There was nothing to do except leave a large force of police and military behind to keep the precarious peace.
Next day, Tuesday, the 200 Irishmen from Edinburgh tried to march out to meet the Scots, but this time Sheriff Speirs, with his police and dragoons, got there first and persuaded them to go quietly. The Irish looked warily at the cavalry drawn up in front, of them, reflected on the superior force of Scots which they would have to meet even if they got through, and walked back into the city.
The incident was over. The contractors met the homeless Irish labourers, sacked many of them, and helped the others to rebuild their huts and start work again. The new huts were put up in the same old style, in spite of the grave displeasure of the Scottish Herald, which, after condemning the riots, went on to say that there was, as the editors put it, another subject to which they must advert, namely, the degrading practice of having the huts of the labourers fitted up so as to accommodate the greatest number in the smallest possible space, without regard either to decency or the health and comfort of the parties occupying them. ‘We were told,’ said the paper,
that in each of the huts which were destroyed, the beds were ranged above one another like the berths on board ship, and that from seventeen to twenty-four families were accommodated in this manner in a temporary building of very small dimensions. The immorality which such a system is calculated to produce must be obvious to all; and it is not to be expected, that people who are subjected to such a degrading condition, and familiarized with all the indecent habits incident to it, will feel any great respect for the laws enacted for the preservation of social order.
Order was something the Scottish Herald greatly prized. Immediately underneath a report of the riots was an account of a temperance dinner given that same Saturday of the riots, at which
the Chairman rose and proposed, as the introductory sentiment of the evening, ‘the Queen and the Royal Family’; and, in doing so, took occasion to pay a warm and well-merited tribute to Queen Victoria for the temperance, economy, punctuality, and order which characterized her court, which in this respect was so different from the Courts of some of her predecessors. The sentiment was received and applauded with great cordiality.
Sheriff Speirs searched for the murderers, but they had escaped him. With the burning of the huts by the Scots he was not unduly concerned. He seemed to think the provocation sufficient to justify the demolition of a few shanties. Afterwards he told a questioner,
I did not form a very unfavourable opinion, particularly of the Scottish labourers, on that occasion: I thought they acted under some mistaken view of the law.
A month later the sheriff still had no murderer, but someone had talked, and he had the names of two men. So he offered a reward of £50 for Peter Clark and Patrick Reilly, Irish labourers since absconded, and wanted for the murder of Constable Pace. Clark was described as thirty-five or forty, five feet eight or nine inches, stout, fair with sandy hair and whiskers, last seen wearing a blue jacket, dark greyish trousers, drab vest, green velvet shooting coat, and ‘large navie boots’. Reilly was about forty, stout, five feet seven or eight, dark, with black hair, and black whiskers mixed with a few grey ones, dressed in a blue bonnet, moleskin jacket, vest, and trousers, and also wearing ‘large navie boots’. But this was a month after the murder, and by then the large navvy boots had tramped a long way off. The murderers were not caught.
But after a much smaller and less dangerous riot at Bathampton, near Bath, the next year, one navvy was caught and tried for his life. One evening some labourers on the Wilts and Somerset Railway were interrupted in a brawl by one John Bailey, who was not in uniform but said he was a constable and told them to stop fighting. They knocked him about, he fell down, and died later of his injuries. Only one of the navvies was recognized and arrested – Maurice Perry – and he stood his trial for murder before Chief Justice Wilde. The evidence was hardly conclusive, and the jury, returning their verdict, said they found Perry ‘guilty of being a party concerned’, but added, ‘we have no evidence of his having given the fatal blow’.
The Chief Justice said, ‘Guilty of being concerned in what, gentlemen?’
One of the jurors, ‘In the murder, my lord.’
The Chief Justice, ‘If he was there, with others, having a common object to prevent the peace officer from putting an end to the fight, that amounts to the crime of murder.’
The jury again consulted for some time, and when they turned round many of them were in tears. The foreman then returned a verdict of guilty, and the Chief Justice, after a little sermon, sentenced Perry to death.
Organized riots like those at Penrith gave the navvy an awesome name. When the memory of Napoleon grew dim, mothers threatened to give fractious children not to him but to a figure of equal terror – a navvy. A legend was created, and nourished with sensational tit-bits of rumour and half-truth dished up as news. In September 1846, the Poole and Dorsetshire Herald carried a paragraph about a navvy working on the line at Ely, 170 miles away. This news item had probably travelled from newspaper to newspaper, being copied intact without checking, as the custom then was. This navvy, it was said, had once been convicted of highway robbery and sentenced to hang. He was on the scaffold when a messenger with a reprieve galloped up. ‘In ten minutes the horse died from exhaustion.’ The sentence was commuted to transportation for life. After ten years and nine months the man who had claimed he was robbed confessed on his d
eath bed to the mayor, ‘that he had the money in his pocket all the time, having been led to this atrocious crime by feelings of revenge’. The accused was brought back to England, granted a free pardon and given £15 for his trouble.
The popular image of navvies was that of depravity and violence, but the truth of the matter seems to be that they were ‘not vicious, rather drunken, and fond of spending their time in a public house’. These are the words of a missionary employed by the Pastoral Aid Society as a railway chaplain, and such missionaries and clergymen were not commonly lenient in their judgement of the godless. The most serious disturbances were in fact religious riots, which occurred whenever Presbyterian could get at Catholic. But apart from this the affrays were little and local, and the violence casual and aimless. The trouble, as the missionary said, was nearly always drink.
Navvies drank every day at their work, but this regular drinking, though it caused many accidents, was not so great an evil as the monthly randy after the pay day. Time and time again the magistrates and police urged the railway contractors to pay weekly, to avoid the inevitable disorder which followed when the navvies were let loose with any large sum in their pockets. Again and again the contractors refused. If the men were paid weekly, they said, there would be four randies a month instead of one. This sounds a plausible argument, but in fact where the men were paid weekly, as they were by a very few contractors, the riots were fewer and the men began to save a little. The real reasons for monthly pays were first that it was less trouble for the contractors, who had to do less bookwork: and second, and much more important, that a long interval between pays was essential to a thriving truck system. If the men had ready money, as they would have if they were paid more frequently, they might buy elsewhere, for cash. But if they were paid only monthly they had no option but to live on credit from the tommy shop. It suited the contractors to pay once a month, and they could not be expected to change their ways to avoid a few riots among the lower orders. So the pays remained a perpetual danger. The men assembled in rabbles, often at the contractor’s public house, and drank their accumulated wages. On the North British line, on a pay night, the whole county was a scene of riot and disorder. Sir Thomas Acland, a Member of Parliament who concerned himself with the condition of railway labourers, once asked a railway missionary:
The Railway Navvies Page 10